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Series: Marvel Legends
Year: 2025
Prelude: Remember that time Parker Brothers tried to become an action figure company? Yeah, they tried to forget it, too. It gave us ROM the Space Knight, though, a long-standing Marvel character, and 46 years later he has now received his first Marvel Legends figure. So charge up your Neutralizer, strap on your rocket pack, and let’s say go!
Review: No, you are not looking at the Silver Surfer, you are looking at ROM. Sure, he’s all silver, too, but he’s also wearing vintage 1970s disco boots and has several old-school robot elements to him, such as his very angular head, his rocket pack, and the hair-dryer like weapons he carries. He’s a robot from the 1970s, streamlined into a modern action figure.
Articulation is pretty great, ROM has double joints on both knees and elbows, ab crunch, and can swivel at the hip and in the chest, too, so all sorts of dynamic poses are no problem at all. His feet are big enough to keep him stable in most poses. Like many Marvel Legends figures he comes with an additional set of hands, so he can either have open hands for holding his weapons or closed fists.
In terms of accessories ROM carries his two signature weapons. The bigger one is the Neutralizer, which he uses to blast Dire Wraiths into Limbo, while the smaller one is an analyzer, which helps him identify Dire Wraiths hiding in human form. He also comes with a blast effect that fits on either weapon. Also included is a small replica of Marvel Comics ROM #1 from 1979, which he can hold and gaze at adoringly.
Bottom line: the figure very nicely replicates ROM as we saw him in the Marvel Comics with great articulation and all the necessary accessories. No complaints except that my version came with a few tiny scratches on his robot noggin, but I have decided to interpret those as battle damage.
Remarks: ROM is a Space Knight of Galador, a very human-like alien who volunteered to become a cyborg in order to defend his home planet from the evil Dire Wraiths. The Space Knights eventually defeated the fleets of the Dire Wraiths, but surviving Wraiths scattered through the universe, using their ability to steal the shape of other living beings to hide on many worlds. ROM ended up on Earth, where his habit of simply blasting what appeared to be innocent humans did not endear him to the people.
The real-world story of ROM is actually more interesting in my mind. In 1979 Parker Brothers tried to enter the action figure market with a robot figure with electronic light-up eyes. His original name was supposed to be Cobol (like the programming language), but eventually became ROM (like Read-Only memory). Computers were the cool new thing back then.
Since that was 1979, the electronics were expensive and bulky, the robot was kind of weirdly proportioned, and the toy failed spectacularly, causing Parker Brothers to remain a board game company. However, the licensed comic book by Marvel was a success, far outliving the toy it was supposed to promote, and ROM kept appearing in the Marvel comics long after his own solo series ended. ROM had a brief stint in the IDW comics, too, as part of Hasbro’s ill-fated shared universe with Transformers, MASK, GI Joe, Micronauts, and Visionaries, before he returned to Marvel, just in time to have his original series reprinted.
Bottom line: Marvel Legends ROM is a very nice mixture of old-school robot and modern action figure. Not sure how interesting he’ll be to someone with no connection to the comic book character (or, God forbid, the original toy), but he’s pretty cool. Recommended to all fans of old-school robots.
Rating: B+
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